I should also mention that I leave Steam VR SS settings on 1.0
First: I have no idea what you are talking about, regarding out of focus panels, save possibly you may refer to the way things are in focus right in the centre of the lenses, but falls off out toward their periphery. There is no way to
simply fix this; It can be mitigated somewhat, by making sure one really does hit the sweetspot of the lenses in the Z axis; Alas, just using the eye relief dials may not help for everybody (myself included), because the shape of one's face (deep-set eyes, heavy brow, protuding cheeks, etc) may not allow the large lenses to get close enough (using the HMD without the foam, mine touch my brow, and I could still do with getting a bit closer - I have ground them along the top edges, to make them less chafing, as well as added 1.5 diopters to their lens-to-screen distance, so that I can use the HMD without glasses). Otherwise, there are hardware solutions that could hypothetically help: Attaching a concave fiberoptic taper to the surface of each display, to match the field curvature of the lenses, or making your own custom frenel lenses, with each segment progressively stronger, to achieve an equivalent effect. Both those would also require updating the distortion parameters of the HMD, to reflect the changed optical path (as does my diopter change, really). All in all not an uncomplicated job. :7
As for the aliasing; No way to get rid of it, that I know, other than setting
both Supersampling
and either SteamVR_ss, or HMDQ to 2.0 (...or 4.0 new scale, for the former); That 4.0 total ss (16 times the workload) looks rather nice (looking e.g. at the highly anisotropic floor underneath the cobra in the menu scene), but leaves you with a slideshow of a game (and to pour salt onto the wound, the game begins to stream out mipmaps, when that happens, leaving you with little detail)
.
(Usually one should only resample
once, and that should be at the last possible stage, in order to preserve as much detail/quality as possible, but these real-time algorithms take a limited amount of samples for each output pixel -- hence the two-stage operation of using both SteamVR supersampling, and then Elite's built-in supersampling on top of that; The latter "bakes in" a first stage of detail, which might simply have been skipped, if using a theoretical 16x SteamVR ss.)
There is a thread "petitioning" FDev to add temporal antialiasing to the game, for potentially better results than the two post-effect options we have today (blurry b'stards), but who knows whether anything ever comes of that... TAA also comes with its own set of issues.
At some point, one will have to try to find a balance between blur and aliasing, that is acceptable to oneself, personally. For my part, I favour crispness any day, so I have Elite's AA
off, and SteamVR's "advanced supersampling filtering" (below the SS slider)
off (
you, on the other hand, may want to make sure it's
on). I can live with some aliasing, if it means I don't have to deal with muddy visuals. (EDIT2: This works as long as A) Framerate is maintained, and B) You supersample enough that there is actual detail popping through each pixel, from frame to frame, with every tiny motion of your head, and not just a low resolution "canvas" discretely hopping around).
(EDIT: There seems to always be talk about there being ways to get good multisampling antialiasing working in deferred renderers (which have superceded "forward" ones, and allow for things like tons of light sources, at low computational cost), but none of this ever seems to make it into actual widespread implementation -- Unreal Engine 4, which is an infamous culprit, when it comes to heavy aliasing, and combatting that with ham-fisted heavy blurring), recently had a forward path shoehorned back into it, just to accomodate new VR titles with decent antialiasing.)